I attended the launch of the Design Management Europe award yesterday, with lectures by Mike Press of the university of Dundee, co-athour of ‘the design agenda’, Grant Davidson of Philips Design, Jesus Garcia of Boreal, and Han Hendriks of Johnson Controls. The event was hosted by Wally Olins.
I’ve seen my share of these get-togethers and it’s easy to get annoyed by the rather curious tendency of designers to keep convincing their peers how all important and strategically essential design is.
Although it must be said that not everything that was said during the afternoon was exactly earth shattering, I really truly enjoyed myself.
A number of reasons:
Mike Press is a great guy. Hs lecture evolved around three great insights that summarize quite well what has been on my mind with regards to the design profession lately and has been a meaningful part of my work as well:
1 we are moving from designing for towards designing with.
2 we are moving from designing things towards design thinking.
3 we are moving from design practice towards design research.
I just thought that was a pretty clever way of grasping the shift design is making in three basic statements.
Then there was something else: each and every lecturer talked about design management in the context of product design and innovation. I was pleasantly surprised by this focus because more often than not, design management is approached from the point of view of corporate identity. In many articles and lectures, design management is confined to the process of managing the consistency and meaning of a house style. What this afternoon demonstrated is that this interpretion of design management is narrow and incomplete. Designmanagement in the context of productdesign and innovation is very much alive and excitingly meaningful. Products are just much cooler than logo’s! This, by the way, leaves me with the question why, in a 200 person audience, me, some of the lecturers, and a student of mine from Delft, were the only people in the room with a product design background.
A couple more one-liners I liked:
‘Designers should not position them selves as felt-tip-fairies creating eye-candy’.
‘Where R&D is concerned with viable and Marketing is concerned with feasible, Design is concerned with desirable’.
‘Philips has all design disciplines internalised except advertising’.
And then, there was Wally Olins in the end saying something along the lines of ‘it’s great how all you young people are connecting design to the business agenda and to the desires and needs of the end user. But at the end of the day, design management is about your creativity and how you put it to use. You –as design management community- will have to have the guts to stand up and do stuff that means something, because you can’t just sit around waiting for business or the end user to ask you for it’.
I say, amen!
and Oh yeah, lest I forget: Tom Dorresteijn, chairman of the BNO and partner of Dumbar, is working on a book. The Draft will be published soon at visual-branding.com.. Judging from the conversation we had, it’s going to be interesting, and the idea of publishing the draft to get responses is great.
Eric, good to see you back on the blogosphere recently; long time no talked ;-(
In any case thanks for sharing your helpful insights & links, but for me it would be far more interesting: Who is endorsing this Award and what’s the official and un-official network behind the scenes
Eric, great summary. Makes me wish I had been there. I actually thought about attending it for a split second…. Next time hope to see you and chat.
Hi Ralph, good to hear from you. Sorry I didn’t talk about the DME itself at all, I chose to focus on the lectures and let the reader draw his own conclusions about the DME. But then I forgot to include the link, so here it is:
http://www.designmanagementeurope.com/index.php?page=dme-network
As you can see it’s a network organisation, I believe it’s initiated by Joao Mena de Matos, manager of the European Design Center, and project manager of the dutch design awards. I’m in favour of the initiative, simply because of the fact that it’s pan european, and as such, supported by the EU (remember our europe assignment ralph?
). Actually, many of the nominees were from eastern europe, wich I think is pretty cool.
> In many articles and lectures, design management is confined to the process of managing the consistency and meaning of a house style.
Good point Erik. I’ve often seen this practice being called “Corporate Design Management” and the stuff that was discussed during the DME as “Design Driven Management”. I guess a design-driven-management-award was too long of a sentence!
Erik,
I really love the insight of ‘we are moving from designing things towards design thinking.’
That’s a pretty big shift in the way things will be done.
I guess the current attitude comes from the way most people still see design. Steve Jobs said it best: “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”
For me, that pretty much sums up the essence of design thinking.
Maxim, that’s a distinction that might work indeed. I’ll have to think about it. It’s an interesting point.
Rik, that’s a great quote by good ol’ Steve. I’ll have to come back on that in a future post. The part about the soul expressing itself in successive outer layers really sets me thinking about all the different roles design can -and should- play in those different layers. See also my next post on Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance. The book also talks about how modern westerners tend to take the outer layers of what they see for the whole truth. This is a great battle to be fought by design. Luckily we have Steve on our side!